The vCenter inventory service install is straight forward and only takes a few minutes. The inventory service caches queries from the Web Broswer to increase the perceived responsiveness of vCenter, and in large environments lets you offload the process to another VM or closer to your administrators. This installation is quick and pain...
Welcome to Part 3 of the 15 part vCenter 5.1 installation series, installing vCenter SSO SSL Certificates. IMPORTANT: Now that VMware has released the vCenter Certificate Automation Tool, I suggest you skip installing trusted SSL certificates during the install process and use the tool to do them post install. It's...
UPDATE: On Sep 18th Cisco released 2.0(4a), which you can download from Cisco support. For those of you that are Cisco UCS customers, word on the street is that a forthcoming firmware update 2.0(4) will be required for official vSphere 5.1 support. Cisco should have the updated firmware out by...
Welcome to Part 2 of the 15 part vCenter 5.1 Update 1 installation series. This post will guide you through the process of creating the vSphere 5.1 Update 1 vCenter SSL certificates. ALL production environments should use trusted SSL certs, not just "high security" environments. Key infrastructure services are probably running on vSphere, so security...
Welcome to the 15-part VMware vCenter 5.1 U1 installation series! Given all of the new components and architecture of VMware vCenter 5.1, I wanted to walk through the entire installation of vCenter 5.1, assuming a greenfield environment. These instructions are assuming you are using vSphere 5.1 Update 1, which was released in...
Today is the day! VMware has publicly released vSphere 5.1, and all of the associated software such as vCenter and vCloud director. You can download the full suite here. They also have a HP ProLiant customized ISO image, should you be using HP servers in your environment. To access all...
A few months ago I blogged about how to create your own custom Cisco UCS ESXi 5 U1 installation media, with the latest security patches and drivers. There was also an ISO image on VMware's web site, which magically disappeared for a while. Well, now it appears to be back....
If you have the pleasure of working with a Cisco UCS server farm, you know ease of which you can upgrade firmware. A few days ago Cisco released the 2.0(3c) version of their UCS software. This is a minor release which fixes a few specific bugs. If you won't run...
When configuring a cluster in vSphere, one of the options that you should always configure is the VMware EVC mode. What is VMware EVC mode? It's the Enhanced vMotion Compatibility setting, which enables vMotion across multiple generations of processors. New processors often come with new instruction sets, and if the...
HP has released a new version (2012.08.0)Â of their "HP Service Pack for ProLiant", a Sept 2012 revision. For those of you unfamiliar with their packaging changes, this is a consolidated bootable ISO that does both offline and online firmware/driver updates. It really simplifies the updating of HP firmware on ProLiant...
O'Reilly Media has released a free eBook version of their "Introducing Windows Server 2012" book. I quickly flipped through the beta version, and found it quite informative. There are so many new features, literally hundreds, in Windows Server 2012 that this is a must read for anyone going to use...
Speaker: Chad Sakac, Vaughn StewartThis was a really great session! Had two of the best sessions on the last day of VMworld. Each protocol has different configuration considerations Majority of customers use block protocols (iSCSI, FC, FCoE) NetApp: NFS 50% usage, block the other 50% from autosupport data Best flexibility...